Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026

Mr LAXALE (Bennelong) (11:47): I rise to speak in support of the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026. This is a bill about growing Australia's nature economy and about who in this place actually wants to see it grow. The idea underneath this scheme is the simplest and fairest one in Australian public policy: big industry should pay for its pollution and those who repair it like farmers and traditional owners should get reimbursed for that repair.

This policy dictates a simple and logical transfer of funds from those who damage our environment to those who repair it, and that's been working well since 2011. The scheme has delivered 190 million tonnes of abatement from more than 2,600 projects. This Nature Repair Market is now worth more than $4 billion, and every tonne of pollution is paid for by polluters, as it should be.

Like most schemes, from time to time, it needs review and reform, and that's what this bill is about. It strengthens the integrity of the scheme so that the trust behind it holds, the consent of native title holders is respected properly, and the whole system keeps growing Australia's nature economy instead of putting it at risk. This bill has practical effects for farmers all over Australia.

It's sitting in paddocks from Bourke to Berowra to Goondiwindi. Let me tell the House about some of the people growing Australia's nature economy right now, today, while those opposite, from the far left to the far right, argue about whether they deserve to keep doing it. There are the Rossers at Wanaaring, two hours west of Bourke.

Their country was finished by the millennium drought—fences falling down, no reliable water, goats and dorpers eating the scrub down to dirt. They laid 80 kilometres of poly pipe, fenced every water point, trapped the goats out and rotated their paddocks properly for the first time in years after their first abatement contract was signed in 2015. For them, it unlocked millions of dollars and brought their property forward 15 years.

When livestock income vanished, carbon paid the bills. It let them destock early. It let them keep their staff on and expand into mixed farming around Forbes.

There's Peter Yench at Cobar, who watched drought take his flock from 8,000 sheep down to only 600. He still drew close to a million dollars a year pre tax from carbon. Tom and Antoinette Archer at Rexton, near Goondiwindi, spent 20 years improving their grazing, fencing and water points, and in 2023 they were issued around 66,000 carbon credits for the carbon their soil had built up.

There's a whole new income stream for farmers sitting alongside the cattle. Stuart Austin at Wilmot, near Ebor, sold around half a million dollars of soil carbon to Microsoft. His soil organic carbon lifted from 2½ per cent to 4½ per cent—more ground cover, more water held, more beef.

Colin Seis at Winona, near Birriwa, holds his grain yields steady while saving more than $100,000 a year in fertiliser and chemicals. Graham and Cathy Finlayson at Bokhara Plains, near Brewarrina, took claypan country nobody wanted and lifted their stocking capacity by almost 80 per cent. Tim Wright at Lana, near Uralla, more than doubled the carrying capacity of his family's property.

In Bourke, Sam Maroulis is selling poly pipes, solar pumps and fencing gear to farmers who would have never otherwise bought it. Younger families are moving back to the bush because there is finally work to keep them there—more than 160 million carbon credits issued, $2.8 billion paid directly into the hands of land managers and an estimated $30 billion more over the next 20 years.

This is what growing Australia's nature economy looks like. It's actual money in farmers' pockets, keeping families on farms and boosting our region's economy. Let's look at those opposite, who want to strangle this system so that nobody notices until it's too late.

Let's start with the Nationals. In 2022 the member for Maranoa, as agriculture minister, wrote concessional tax treatment for carbon credit income into law. He called it a diversified source of on-farm income.

Four years later, his party is campaigning to abolish the market that that income comes from. They gave farmers this income. Now they want to steal it back.

Their leader says he will scrap net zero and get rid of what he calls Labor's carbon tax. The tax he means is the one writing cheques to Bourke, to Cobar, to Goondiwindi and to Wanaaring. A division having been called in the House of Representatives— Sitting suspended from 11:53 to 12:04 Mr LAXALE: Ninety-eight per cent of demand for these credits exists because big emitters are compelled to buy them.

Destroy that demand and you take the income away from a grazier who borrowed against a contract in good faith. The Nationals have become the party of big emitters, not the party of farmers. The Nationals also like to claim this scheme locks up farmland.

The Climate Change Authority's own independent report released this month found no material conversion of high-value agricultural land to carbon projects at the national scale to date. The authority concluded that sequestration and farm production can exist side by side. They do not compete.

Brendan Foran, the Convenor of Growing Australia's Nature Economy, wrote in the Financial Review last month that the claim that carbon projects lock up farmland is a myth. He said: … the scheme is on track to issue between 22 million and 26 million credits this year, worth about $900 million at today's prices. None of that money goes to Canberra— Almost all of it— … goes through farm gates.

That is growing Australia's nature economy, and those are the words of the people actually building it. I'd invite the Nationals member to name one thing his party has done for farm income this year. Then I would invite him to take a look at Peter Yench's bank statement to see what carbon credits are delivering to farmers.

Then, of course, we have the Greens. Earlier this year, they threatened for months to bring down the method that pays governments to leave koala forests standing rather than log them. Then, when the vote finally came, they split three ways.

Seven of them backed it. Senators McKim, Bleyer and Steele-John voted to kill it, walking into the same lobby as Matt Canavan. I want the House to sit with that method that actually delivers, because this is not abstract and because of what happened next.

On 10 September, the Senate formally endorsed the improved native forest management method under this very ACCU Scheme. That single decision is the step that makes the Great Koala National Park possible. When established, it will be the second-largest park in New South Wales, protecting more than 475,000 hectares of native forests and existing reserve.

It will protect more than 100 threatened species, including 12,000 koalas and 36,000 greater gliders. No fossil fuel company will ever be allowed to buy a single credit generated from it. For the first time in New South Wales, the park will employ Aboriginal rangers through Aboriginal community controlled organisations, putting cultural knowledge at the care and the centre of how it is run.

This deal was three years in the making, and it was backed by the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, the North East Forest Alliance, the National Parks Association, the World Wildlife Fund, the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, Greenpeace and the Great Koala National Park Aboriginal Advisory Panel. The New South Wales minister for the environment thanked the New South Wales Greens by name for their support in getting it done.

On 10 September, the New South Wales Greens were thanked in a ministerial statement for helping deliver 12,000 koalas a home, but on that same day federal Greens senators announced they would vote against the bill in front of this House today. This bill protects the integrity of the exact scheme that has just delivered the Great Koala National Park. One arm of their party, thankfully, saw reason and stood with Labor to save the koala.

The other arm walked into a party room on the same day and decided to vote against the system that made it possible. I don't know which Greens this House is supposed to believe—the ones thanked for building the Great Koala National Park or the ones voting against this bill that keeps the same scheme that built it standing up. Now they want a cap on how many credits big emitters can use.

If you cap the credits, you cut the demand. If you cut the demand, you cut the price. If you cut the price, then the funded burning stops in Arnhem Land.

If you cut the price, funded goat control stops in the Flinders Ranges. Every outcome I'm about to describe goes backwards. The Greens have never once told this House who pays for nature repair if industry does not.

Nature repair in this country needs around $7.3 billion a year. That's more than the entire annual budget of the New South Wales police force. They will not take it from hospitals; nor should they.

They will not take it from schools; nor should they. They would rather have a fantasy scheme than one that saves the quoll or protects the koala. Perfect is the enemy of the good, and in their hands it's become the enemy of the quoll, because this is what this scheme also funds.

I want the House to hear the animals this money is protecting, not just the balance sheet. The Gouldian finch is endangered. What is killing it is hot wildfires late in the dry season burning out its seed supply and nesting hollows.

What saves it is cool early burning. In Arnhem Land, Indigenous rangers carry out that work across more than 80,000 square kilometres, funded by carbon credits alongside ranger jobs, cultural heritage work and on-country schools like the Nawarddeken Academy. The northern quoll is endangered.

Feral cats are eating it out of an existence made deadlier by hot fire and heavy grazing stripping away the ground cover the quoll needs to hide in. Fire management, feral herbivore control and restored ground cover are all funded by carbon farming. That's what these credits pay for.

The yellow-footed rock-wallaby was headed for extinction in the Flinders and Olary ranges 30 years ago. More than 200,000 feral goats have been removed since. Today, the population and the country it occupies are more than 10 times what they were.

A finch, a quoll and a rock wallaby—pulled back from the edge because a big polluter had to pay a land manager to do the work. That is the choice in front of this House. One side wants to abolish this scheme outright; the other side wants to cap it and starve the demand that gives any value to it.

Only Labor wants to strengthen it. Between the far left and the far right, they arrive at the same place from opposite ends: a grazier at Wanaaring with no income and a forest with nothing left in it. This government doesn't want to see that happen.

The Carbon Market Institute, the National Farmers' Federation and the Productivity Commission all back these reforms. That is farmers, economists and industry standing in the same place while those opposite stand somewhere else entirely. Labor is interested in growing Australia's nature economy properly with the integrity to make it last—real farmers, real money, real animals and real outcome, all of it paid for by carbon credits, not by the taxpayer.

We'll defend this system, and we'll improve this system. I commend this bill to the House.